Strained
by Hufflepuffian
Summary: A young, geeky Canadian girl and her friend discover their powers. Unfortunately, hers may kill her if she doesn't learn to control it. And we all know how nonchalant teens are about these things. Well, it was nice knowing her.
1. Health Care

**Author's Note: **Hopefully you like this, at least thus far. I've got an arch planned out for at least Jocelyn, possibly Dylan if he starts talking to me in my sleep. For the record, they are in Canada (hence the jabs at Health Care), but they will become intertwined in other stories as it progresses. And yes, they aren't shocked to hear of their powers, much as I'm sure any comic book geek wouldn't be.

* * *

I stared down at the floor, my mind trying to take in everything that had just happened. There were 5 sections in each square of the wooden tile. Shaking my head, I looked to the wall. There was too much counting on the floor. The wall was blank, a really disgusting shade of yellow. So disgusting that I actually had to turn my head again to avoid the inevitable sick that was burning up my esophagus. 

But walls don't usually make me throw up. "Shit, Joc, what's wrong with your stomach?" the guy next to me asked. I looked over at him, holding my hair back, my eyebrows bushed down in a glare of death. "No, seriously," he continued. He had a look of absolute disgust on his face. "It's like..." he paused, "holy shit."

Finally, I bothered to look down at it. In the wind, I could see my shirt blowing forwards. That was strange, because the wind was at my back. I turned my head and let out the loudest string of curses I could muster. My shirt was going right through my back by means of a hole where my stomach should be

* * *

As it turns out, there was nothing wrong, and the doctor merely said we were seeing things. Then, since we're teenagers, he felt the need to ask what drugs we had used in the past twenty-four hour period. Yeah, as if I'll tell him that 'oh, sorry, I don't do drugs. As it turns out, I'm a social recluse who has better things to do with her time.' 

That would be followed by him saying, through laughter, 'no shit, a loner with better things to do. Was it Ecstasy or what? I need my fix, anyway.'

I shook my head as I hopped off the clinic's bed. I really needed to stop letting my imagination get carried away. I stepped out of the door and looked down the hall, trying to gage where they had taken Dylan. The doctor followed, laying a cold hand on my bare shoulder. How is it that possible? It was like a billion degrees outside. "He's down at the end of the hall, 4C." His hand patted against mine again and he brushed past me. All the doctor's around here were sickos.

At least we had free health care, despite waiting in the lobby for three hours before we got the hole in my stomach straightened out. I nodded curtly and turned down in the direction of the room Dylan was in. It wasn't difficult to find, seeing as there was only one other door in the hallway. It was already open, so I took the opportunity to poke my head in, to see what was going on. Unfortunately, there were no lab tables, with Dylan's brain being poked and prodded at by a mad scientist, but there was a pretty hot doctor guy talking to him. Dylan turned his head towards the door and smiled at me in his usual sarcastic manner. "They think I'm insane."

Dylan, interrupting whatever it was the doctor was saying, seemed to make me noticed, as the guy turned towards me and smiled. "Jocelyn Robson, right?"His smile was so big and toothy, I nearly swooned. But I nodded, it was all I could do in a situation like that without embarrassing myself. "Come on in, I was just discussing with Dylan here that..." he stopped talking as I walked into the room and his smile faded. "Close the door behind you." The first thought that came to mind was a good one, thinking I was going to get raped by somebody so hot, but I doubted it. Making a mental note to write a fanfic with him as the lead character, I shut it and continued in.

I really wasn't expecting it when he turned into a she right in front of my eyes. Dylan looked at me in stupor and i couldn't help but laugh, despite the uniform weirdness of the situation. That was pretty twisted. The man—woman--stood from his—her, damn it—seat and smiled at the two of us coolly and kindly. Dylan shot another glance at me and once again I laughed. "Ms. Robson, Mr. Moss, my name is Candice Wilmer." She sounded serious enough. She eyed me and stuck out a hand to shake before turning to Dylan to do the same. "I apologize for the... manner... in which we met, but it was for security reasons." She smiled a similar smile as the doctor (which, I suppose, was her all along, wasn't it?). "I've been sent to speak to you about... your powers."

The longer I looked at her the more obvious it became that she wasn't exactly serious at all, rather straining herself to act serious in front of us. I mean, she couldn't have been any older than 25, and nobody that young spoke so eloquently, at least not anymore. "Powers?" was all I said in return, then Dylan cut me off.

"You mean like Wolverine? X-Men?" He grinned at the thought.

"How about Sue Storm and Domino?" she responded coyly and surprisingly quickly. Judging by that, she either a) had it prepared, or b) was also a comic book geek.

"Sounds reasonable," Dylan said. His shock had clearly passed with the presence of a pretty girl and to be rather honest, it didn't shock me much, either. I had more or less lost the ability to be surprised when there was a hole in my stomach.

And then it hit me.

"I can go invisible?" I said, grinning lopsidedly.

Candice turned back to me and grinned. "They said you'd be easy to convince." Well, we were geeks. This was the best thing that had possibly ever happened to us, as bloody confusing as it was. I flinched slightly at the word 'they'--I had never gotten over that movie, but also because They were likely some sort of evil terrorist organization planning to destroy earth using insane bunnies. "Could you lift up your shirt?" she asked me.

Suddenly things went back into chaos. She just wanted me naked, there was no power. "Why?" I asked her. I could see Dylan grinning stupidly, though he'd seen me naked on more than one occasion since we were little.

"So you don't die," Candice retorted. Her rather pleasant tone turned into an annoyed one at a moment's notice. "The doctor didn't see anything because I didn't let him see anything." It didn't make any sense still. I furrowed my brow. "Alright then," she sighed. The next thing I knew, my shirt was gone and had been replaced by a freakishly tight tube top. I looked down and saw the hole in my stomach was back.

I got a better look at it, this time. Around where the edges were, I could see the inside of myself, blood slowly trickling down the rest of my stomach to my waist. "As you can see," Candice said, exasperatedly, as though she dealt with this daily, "you're about to bleed to death. Thankfully, we had somebody prevent it from gushing out too fast. _I_--" she stressed the word I greatly, "am here to help you solidify that. Your case of invisibility is a weird one and people are worried you're going to die if you let it out radically like that again."

At that point, I more or less tuned out. I was being lectured, and I never even got the change to revel in the fact that I was awesome.


	2. Blizzard Entertainment

**Author's Note: **So this chapter features a bit more of the geekiness of the characters. Hope you like it, and sorry for all of the Warcraft references, some of them relate to myself and my friends playing, so I added them in.

* * *

"So, do you think she was insane?" 

I turned my head towards Dylan, who had to tug on the back of my shirt to stop me before I walked into incoming traffic. "Who?" I asked him.

He didn't respond right away. Instead, he waited for the little walking man to appear before talking. "That Candice person," he answered, as though he had forgotten most of the things she had done.

"Let's see," I began sarcastically as we reached the far side of the road, turning left on the sidewalk. "She turned from a man to a woman, changed my shirt, created a hole in my stomach, made my shirt turn back to normal, turn back into a man, and then usher us out of the building. If anything, we're crazy." I took a moment to consider what had happened at the clinic. "I don't think there's anything crazy about it, just strange."

"Yeah." Yeah? What kind of answer was that? I brought up an arm to smack Dylan upside the head. "Hey—I'm just saying, it's like the X-Men. Last I checked, that was a comic book."

He had a point. I didn't quite understand it just yet, but it had to be real, or else I wouldn't have had a hole in my stomach. I scratched the back of my head and sighed. "It's kinda cool, though..." I turned my head to him and smiled. "Probability manipulation? You could, like, actually pass a test for once. Now that's lucky..." He smacked me in the arm and muttered something about ADD and being too busy playing Warcraft to study. "Yeah, yeah," I muttered, "we really need to get to 70 soon."

When Dylan didn't respond to that, I let it slide. Usually when either of us ended a conversation abruptly like that we'd do something about it. But _something_ wasn't there today, everything felt different. "Do you think..." he started suddenly, causing me to turn my head, "that I could manipulate a random number generator?"

"You're a moron," I told him. "Why would you use it to get an epic staff when you could be off stopping bridges from falling or winning the lottery?"

He winced. "Win the lottery? Is that allowed?"

I grinned at him, raising my arm again. He took that as a volatile sign and flinched away, but I merely put my arm around his shoulders. "You were given this deus ex machina for a reason, young Paladin... And you're saying you don't want to win thirty five million dollars?" I had known Dylan all my life and I nearly scolded myself for asking that question: of course he didn't want the money, what could he use money for? Neither of us went shopping (aside from JINX clothing and vintage Marilyn Monroe memorabilia) and didn't need money. Besides, 35 million was a bit much, we'd probably go insane and spend it all on time cards for Warcraft, or maybe even take up EverQuest.

"I'd rather get my epic ring." This time, I smacked him in the arm. "Besides," he said in his I'm-about-to-correct-your-usage-of-the-English-language voice, "it's not really a deus ex machina, there was no plot before this moment to fix."

"Sure there was," I interjected, but then bit my tongue. There wasn't. "Err... Maybe we'll be popular."

"I don't want that book," he said glumly. Neither did I, being popular was such a chore.

* * *

[Nooney says: My stomach disappeared again. How the &! did Candice say to fix it? 

Cuddles says: I wasn't paying attention.

Nooney says: Screw you.

Cuddles says: k.

* * *

Though it took me every ounce of concentration I possessed—and a lot I didn't know I had—I did finally manage to fix my stomach. Looking back on it all, I probably should have listened to her, but what was the fun in that? By the next day I had lost my toes, my nose, and my stomach a second time, and it was beginning to hurt. I stood in front of Dylan's door and knocked on it as loudly as I could. It was 7AM on a Sunday in the summer. Yeah, he was gonna kill me, but his parents were home and there was no way I'd let him come over in case they decided to do some strange polka dance again. From inside, I could hear his footsteps muffled along his carpeted floor and he swung the door open, glaring at me. "What?" 

I grinned. "Get a shirt and some pants on," I told him, looking down at his boxers. "Or you can come help me find Candice like that."

He grinned in his sarcastic manner and moved next to the door to let me in. "Give me a minute, I'm almost level 39." As I stepped in he closed the door behind me and moved down the hallway to the room where he kept his laptop.

"Grinding in your boxers?" I questioned, smirking. He cast a glare back at me, probably resentful at the fact that I had interrupted him this early. It wasn't likely he was doing anything _else_, considering the fact that I figured he was asexual or something. Possibly a robot, I wasn't sure. He seemed to have no desire towards women—or men, for that matter—that I could see. He sat down in his little chair that was off-limits to anybody but me when I was fixing his computer once, and lost all train of thought involving me, tapping the keyboard and mouse as though I wasn't there.

I took a seat on the couch on the opposite end of the room as his desk and just stared at the wall. "So, you got your stomach back?" When he spoke, I was caught off guard. He seemed preoccupied with the game, so I didn't answer. About a minute later, he spoke again. "Well?"

"Hmm? Oh... yeah."

"Good."

"Yeah."

"Shit." His voice became much more human now and sounded like a mix between excitement and shock. "Shit, shit, shit. Joc..." I stood up and walked over to his desk, staring down at the screen. He grabbed onto the sleeve of my sweater and pulled on it excitedly. He looked like the ugly school girl who had just been asked to the dance by the quarterback. "I got it."

"You idiot," I told him, tugging my arm away. "You've used your powers for evil, you've like... disturbed the force!"

"No I didn't!" He sounded in denial already. I shook my head. "And the force doesn't even exist, I disrupted nothing." I grinned and turned my head, preparing to walk back to the couch. Now that he got his stupid little ring I had a feeling he'd be playing all day, rather than help me learn how to not die. Then he said 'shit' again and I figured a second one had dropped. But he didn't sound quite as excited this time, so I turned my head to see what it was—with any luck, he had been killed by a passing Troll before he managed to loot the ring and by the time he got back from the graveyard the corpse would be gone, but then I realized he made his own luck.

Or maybe not, I realized, when I saw his screen had turned to black and there was smoke coming from the computer.


	3. System Restore

Maybe it was just us, but finding somebody who can change their appearance—and supposedly those of others—at will was rather difficult, even a fairly small town like ours. We returned to the Clinic to ask for some sort of information on him (since she was a he here) but the secretary seemed too busy playing Tetris to help us. She muttered something about the state of government in this world and to be quite honest, I can say that today I learned how bad Canadian health care really is.

We stood outside of the clinic looking around the parking lot. Neither of us obviously would remember what cars were there the day before, but it was worth a shot. As you may expect, neither of us saw anything the slightest bit recognizable. "Why don't you use your uber-luck-powers to make us be able to find her?" Dylan only grunted his response and I figured it meant something along the lines of 'shut up or I'll make a piano fall on your head'. "Yeah, well..." I muttered, "at least yours would help in a situation like this."

Another grunt.

"And at least yours isn't going to kill you if we don't find this stupid woman who just seemed to want to torment us." That seemed to set something off inside of him an his voice rose to one reserved for idiots in the cafeteria, kids who stopped randomly in the hallways, and me when I was being pig-headed, oblivious, or just plain stupid.

"You know what? Shut up. Holy shit, all I hear from you is Candice this, Candice that. You're obviously not going to _die,_" he scolded, "because at least you know how to stop it temporarily."

I rolled my eyes, people were staring at us as they walked in and out (more in, since one people leaves every few hours, it seemed) of the clinic as though we were just stoned or something. "Okay," I said flatly, but my voice quickly rose. "Okay, let's have a moment of silence for your _laptop_, which, for the record, your parents bought and you probably had all of the files back up on a billion disks, hidden around the world just—just in case."

"Good God, shut up."

"Fine."

"Good, I like you better when you don't talk, anyway." He jumped into the parking lot, looking back at me. This time, he didn't sound as angry, more headstrong and upset. "I'm going home," he told me and I merely nodded and mumbled 'whatever'.

* * *

In retrospect, letting him go like that wasn't a good idea, considering my fate was technically in his PMSing little hands, and he probably would make a piano fall on my head. I couldn't move as I watched him walk off, turn the corner at the end of the road and disappear just like that. God knows how many years of friendship gone just like that. I looked down at the ground and closed my eyes, shaking my head. "I'm an idiot." 

The thought of how I was going to find Candice was probably the most prevalent thought going through my brain, however. Friendships could be mended, but that hole (metaphorical and in my case, physical) would be the end of me, and she was the only one who could help. Well, not necessarily the only one, but the only person I knew of.

This thought led more thoughts: in one day, my count of _mutants_ went from zero to three. Were there more? Were we the only ones? Is this like a public thing, an underground thing? How did Candice find us? How did Candice know what was going on? Were they watching us, were they watching anybody else? Was the clinic just a ruse, was she impersonating a real doctor to talk to us?

My head started hurting with all the thinking.

I stepped onto the pavement of the parking lot and began walking towards the road and the corner that Dylan had turned. Feeling like a moron still, I continued going straight along the sidewalk, keeping my head down. I didn't even know what I was looking for. Seriously, how do you find somebody who doesn't look like herself one minute to the next? I lifted my head and stared down the street. I could see three teenagers leaning on the fencing keeping the sidewalk off of private property. I couldn't help but roll my eyes. They went to my school and let's just say I'm not the most liked kid there. As I approached, I could see them turning their heads towards me and whispering something, accompanied by laughter. I really didn't care, but when they stood up straight from their loitering and started walking towards me I figured there was a problem. Bracing myself, I anticipated the most unbearably fake conversation I would ever hold in my life.

"Hey, Jocelyn!" A girl with bleached blond hair and hoop earrings I believed was named Ashley called out to me, waving with a smile. I grinned sarcastically and waved back. "How's your summer going?"

"Great," I lied through my teeth, still holding the faux smile. "Yours?"

Ashley tittered quietly and looked over to another girl, also with bleached hair, but she looked more like a hooker than Ashley, I think her name is Michelle. Ashley then said, "Not much, turns out I'm not pregnant after all!" I said 'that's great' encouragingly. Rumor had it that she had slept with Mitchell—who happened to be the third person they were with—and he had gotten her pregnant, she was even beginning to sport a baby bump.

It was Michelle who started the downfall of the facade when she said "I thought you got an abortion?" Mitchell nearly choked on the pop he was drinking and I just burst out laughing. I could sense a death glare going in Michelle's direction, but Ashley preferred taking out her anger on me.

"What's so funny, Robson?" she snapped.

I turned to face her. "I didn't say it, she did," I reminded her, pointing at Michelle, who was beet red at this point. Mitchell was in complete shock, unable to say anything.

"Don't rag on my friends," Ashley defended, crossing her arms. Michelle looked around in confusion, but nodded affirmatively, glad it wasn't her fault. Mitchell still looked like a little lost puppy, did she say _abortion?_ My moment of thought involving how cute it was that Mitchell didn't know he could have had Lil' Mitch (I really had nothing against him, he was actually kind of nice when we were paired up in Grade 9 French) was interrupted with a punch to the side of my face. It caught me off guard and instinctively, I hit back, slapping Ashley square in the cheek.

The next few moments fell silent, at least on my end. I could see Mitchell saying something but I really didn't pay attention to what it was, considering I then got kicked in the shin by a giddy Michelle. I staggered backwards a step, trying to gage what was going on. Ashley's fist moved towards my nose and made a strong impact. I heard a snap, but I figured it was her knuckles rather than my nose since she wasn't all that strong and the punch was a weak one at best, but still my head started throbbing. Some sort of liquid touched my upper lip and I figured it was blood. I looked up and pinched my nose and heard a scream from either of the moron girls.

"Where's her hand?" One of them asked.

"I don't know, did you hit it off?" The other ponded.

Only Mitchell was the voice of reason. He took hold of my sides and turned me around. In a low voice, he said, "come on, I'll take you down to the clinic." If anything, they had to have had bandages, right? I felt his weight move mine forward and he began guiding me down the street, all the while I stared up at the nothingness that tried to suppress the flow of blood. He probably thought I was some kind of freak.

The way down the road back to the clinic, Mitchell said nothing, but I felt his grip around me tighten. As we reached the doors, most of my arm had gone. The flow of blood would likely be stopped if I let go, so I took a chance. Taking my hand off of my nose (though I couldn't see it or anything past the elbow), I jabbed my arm back into his stomach to loosen his grip on my and ran for it.

By the time I got to the end of the parking lot, I couldn't see myself or my clothes.


End file.
